He moved quickly now, so quickly that he was at the bottom of the steps before Flavia moved.
‘He’s inside,’ Flavia said softly to Brunetti, gesturing with her chin to the door that hung ajar at the far side of the courtyard.
La Capra stepped into the water as if it weren’t there, but he acknowledged the presence of the three people who stood in the pounding rain by keeping the barrel of his shotgun levelled at them as he walked across the courtyard. At the door to the cellar, he paused and cried out into the space that loomed beyond it, ‘Salva? Salva, answer me.’
His knees disappeared into the water as he started down the first step. For an instant, he looked back towards Brunetti and the two women. But then he seemed simply to forget about them as he turned back towards the dark cavern, into which he sank as he took another step, and then another.
‘Flavia, quick!’ Brunetti said. He pivoted around, Brett’s weight balanced against his hip, and pushed her, stumbling limply, towards Flavia. Surprised by the sudden motion, Flavia put out her arms without thinking and grasped at Brett, but she lacked the strength to support her and they both sank to their knees in the water. Leaving them, Brunetti ran across the courtyard, splashing heavily. Beyond the door, he could hear La Capra’s voice as he called his son’s name again and again. He grabbed the side of the door with both hands and forced its leaden weight through the water, then viciously kicked it closed, hand scrambling at the bar until he shot it home.
From behind the door, the shotgun boomed out, filling the trapped space with its echo. Pellets pattered against the wooden door, but the full blast missed the door and pitted the stone wall beside it. Again it roared out, but La Capra fired blind, and the blast crashed uselessly into the water.
Brunetti splashed back across the courtyard towards Flavia and Brett, who were on their feet now and moving slowly towards the main door that still stood open. He moved to Brett’s other side, and gripped her around the waist, urging her forward. As they neared the door, they heard loud splashings and equally loud shouts approaching them in the calle beyond. Brunetti looked up and saw Vianello push through the doorway, followed by two uniformed policemen with pistols drawn.
‘Three of them are upstairs,’ Brunetti told them. ‘Be careful. They’re probably armed. There’s another one in the storeroom. He’s got a shotgun.’
‘Is that what we heard?’ Vianello asked.
Brunetti nodded, then he looked beyond them. ‘Where are the others?’
‘Coming,’ Vianello said. ‘I called from the bar up in the campo. They put out a radio call. Cinquegrani and Marcolini were nearby, so they answered the call,’ he explained, nodding towards the two officers, who had taken up a position under the balcony, out of the possible line of fire from the upper storeys of the palazzo.
‘Do we go and get them?’ Vianello asked, looking up towards the door at the top of the steps.
‘No,’ Brunetti said, seeing no sense in it. ‘We wait for the others to get here.’ As if summoned by his words, a two-pitched siren wailed in the distance and grew louder as it approached. Behind it, he heard another, waning its way up the Grand Canal from the direction of the hospital.
‘Flavia,’ he said, turning towards her. ‘Go with Vianello. He’ll take you down to the ambulance.’ Then, to the sergeant: ‘Get them down there and come back. Send the men up here.’ Vianello splashed to his side and, with the ease of great strength, bent and lifted Brett into his arms. With Flavia following, he carried her from the courtyard and down the narrow calle towards the embankment, where two blue lights flashed intermittently through the endless rain.
There followed a lull. As Brunetti allowed himself to relax a little, his body began to pay the price, and his teeth rattled together while he shook with a dead chill. He forced himself to move through the water and joined the two officers under the protection of the balcony, at least out of the rain.
A scream of pure animal terror rang out from behind the door to the storeroom, and then La Capra began to howl his son’s name again and again. After a time, the name disappeared and was replaced by a shrill waning that flowed out from behind the door and filled the courtyard with his grief.
Brunetti winced at the sound, silently urging Vianello to hurry. He recalled the sight of Semenzato’s battered skull, the sound of Brett’s tortured speech, but still he shied away from the sound of the man’s grief.
‘Hey, you down there,’ a man called from the door at the top of the stairs. ‘We’re coming down. We don’t want any trouble.’ When he turned, Brunetti saw the three men standing with their arms raised over their heads.
Vianello came in then, with four men wearing bullet-proof vests and carrying machine guns. The three men on the stairs saw them, too, and stopped to call out again. ‘We don’t want any trouble.’ The four armed men fanned out inside the courtyard, pulled by instinct and training to take cover behind the marble columns.
Brunetti started towards the door to the storeroom but froze when he saw two of the machine guns turned towards him. ‘Vianello,’ he called out, now with something to be angry at, ‘tell them who I am.’ He realized that he must be no more than a rain-sodden man with a pistol in his hand.
‘It’s Commissario Brunetti,’ Vianello called across the courtyard to them; the machine guns turned away from him and redirected themselves at the men frozen on the stairs.
Brunetti continued towards die door, from which the wailing still issued unabated. He moved the bolt and pulled the door back. It stuck, and he had to force its swollen bottom across the stone pavement towards him. Outlined by the bright lights flooding the courtyard, he presented a perfect target to anyone safe inside the darkened storeroom, but he didn’t think of this; the wailing made that impossible.
It took a few moments for his eyes to adjust to the darkness inside, but when they did, he saw La Capra kneeling to his waist in the water, bent down in a masculine piet à that was a grotesque copy of the one Brunetti had just seen in the courtyard. But this image held a finality the other lacked, for here a parent keened over a dead and only son whose body he had pulled to himself from the filthy water.
* * * *
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Brunetti opened the door to his office and, finding it no more than warm and the heating system silent, breathed a silent prayer of thanksgiving to Saint Leandro, even though weeks had passed since he had worked his yearly miracle. There were other signs of spring: at home that morning, he had noticed that the pansies on the balcony were battering their way through the winter-hardened earth in the vases, and Paola had said she had to replant them this weekend; the wooden table, legs injected with poison, baked in the sun beside them; that morning, he’d seen the first of the black-headed seagulls that spent a brief spring holiday on the waters of the canals each year before heading off elsewhere; and the air breathed with a sudden softness that flowed like a benediction across the islands and the waters.
He hung his coat in the cupboard and walked over to his desk, but he veered away from it and went to stand at the window. There was motion on the scaffolding that covered San Lorenzo this morning; men moved up and down on the ladders and scrambled across the roof. Unlike the bursting insistence of nature, all of this man-made activity, Brunetti was sure, was no more than a false spring and would quickly end, no doubt with the renewal of the contracts.